I argued design merits with my instructors in college everytime they said that light colors were preferred over black. They would point out sites like eBay, travel sites, amazon, etc., typical e-commerce sites. THEN, since I was heavily into designing a site focusing on graphics and art, we went to places like (my page at) Renderosity, 3DCommune, Renderotica, Animotions, to name a few, and what do they have? Very dark or black backgrounds. None of them could argue my point that for graphics intensive viewing, the dark was better. I think the biggest problem here is that we, as artistic types, do not like anything interfering with our viewing of images - including marketplace product ads. Can you imagine for one minute what it would look like if you were watching a wide-screen movie on your tv and the top and bottom bars were WHITE?! Knowing how a pretty large portion of computer users have not the slightest idea of how things work, they just "click and go", I'm not surprised that so many keep the the light background. It prolly scares them to death to try to figure out how to change the colors. And really, since when is market research, (or consulting for that matter), ever anything more than the "Fad du Jour"? I am soooooo happy with the fixes, and especially the What's New button, so I know you guys are paying at least some attention to us. But really, the light background IMHO, has got to go, or let us set the colors please.